Last night, Irish Woman and I went out to see a movie that wasn’t animated or involve puppets.   The Avengers looked tempting, but we decided to go for Dark Shadows.  This is another Tim Burton / Johnny Depp collaboration, and you can tell these two have become very good at working together.

The story is basically this:  Rich boy meets poor girl, poor girl throws herself at rich boy, rich boy rejects poor girl in favor of another, poor girl bewitches her rival, who commits suicide.  Rich boy follows suit, but wakes from the dead as a vampire.  Poor girl has rich boy vampire locked in a coffin and buried, then spends 200 years tormenting his family.  Rich boy is freed from his coffin and hilarity ensues.

Dark Shadows is a re-interpretation of the TV show of the same name from the 1960’s and 1970’s.  Where the TV show was a melodramatic soap opera, the movie is a dark comedy.  The move from melodrama to comedy was done very well, with very little slapstick or overt attempts to get a laugh.  Most of the comedy is of  the “fish out of water” category, which Americans have enjoyed since Rip van Winkle woke up.  The movie is set in a remote Maine fishing village in the early 1970’s, and the visuals of both the town, the surrounding area, and the Collins mansion are excellent.  The Maine coast is shown as not much more than high cliffs, sharp rocks, pine trees, and pounding waves.  The town itself is plastered with retro advertisements, old cars, and even has a full service gas station.  The mansion is a gloomy, dusty place, which is the perfect setting for a Tim Burton film.

Johnny Depp plays the main character, Barnabus Collins, and he is joined by a very well-put together ensemble of actors, including Michelle Pfeiffer as his great-to-the-power-of-n grand-niece.  Her character, Elizabeth, is the matriarch of the family and, along with her brother, Roger, is the sole remaining adult Collins.  There are two children in the family mansion: Elizabeth’s daughter Carolyn, a rebellious twit of a teenage girl, and Roger’s son David, a young boy whose mother died in a boating accident and is having ‘trouble’ admitting that she is gone.  Helena Bonham Carter plays Dr. Hoffman, a psychiatrist who is living with the Collins  family to treat David.  Eva Green plays Angelique Bouchard, the vengeful witch who cursed Barnabus in the 1700’s and has been picking off his family for two centuries.  The part of the ‘innocent’ Victoria Winters, who is the spitting image of Barnabus’ dead love from the 1700’s, is played by Bella Heathcote.

The plotting and timing of the story was very well paced.  The movie comes in at almost exactly two hours, and I wasn’t bored in any of it.  It’s not an action movie by any means, but the acting and story were good enough that I didn’t lose interest.  One quibble I had was that the movie is set in Maine, but exactly one minor character had a Maine accent.  That kind of threw me at times, but didn’t detract too much from my enjoyment of the film.  I contrast that with Johnny Depp doing a pretty good impression of an English gentleman’s accent.  Basically, take a lot of the Keith Richards out of Jack Sparrow and sent him to Eton, and you have his rendition of Barnabus Collins.

The original score for the movie was done by Danny Elfman, who has also worked with Tim Burton on multiple occasions.  His score didn’t have any of the bouncy nature a lot of his earlier movie music had.  Instead it better fit the understated, dark atmosphere of the movie.  The other music in the film was appropriate for the time period of the story, 1972.  It included Elton John, The Carpenters, and Alice Cooper.

The movie has that Tim Burton “slightly odd” feel to it, but it’s not laid on as thick as a lot of his other works, and it plays nicely with the original melodramatic storyline.  There are several things that I saw watching Dark Shadows that I was able to say “That comes out of Beetlejuice” or something similar, but they were subtle and didn’t detract from the film.

Overall, I’d say that Dark Shadows is definitely worth the price of admission, but will probably be overshadowed by The Avengers and other summer blockbusters.  The showing we went to, on the opening night of the film, was about 3/4 full, and the audience tended towards an older crowd.  There were a few teenagers and 20-somethings, but not enough to make this one a runaway hit financially.  That would be a shame, as the film ended in such a way that would make a sequel very easy to do.  It might have benefited from a release in the fall, which would have dove-tailed nicely with Halloween.

If you enjoyed the original TV show or the first Addams Family movie, you should enjoy this one.  I definitely recommend it.